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In 1952 an Iranian-Assyrian student Hannibal Alkhas came to the U.S to study medicine, but decided instead to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. There he studied under Boris Anisfeld, one of his most influential teachers. After returning to Iran, Alkhas helped modernize the pedagogy of painting in the School of Fine Arts at the University of Tehran, where he taught many prominent Iranian artists. In 1963 another young artist, Mehdi Hosseini, came to Chicago and enrolled in the painting department at the School of the Art Institute. Having experienced the Midwestern art scene, he returned to Iran and started teaching at art universities, becoming one of the pioneers of Iranian contemporary art. Though he is not heavily represented on the market, he is one of the leading historians of Persian painting and is on the faculty of the University of the Arts in Tehran.

After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, many families moved to the U.S to seek a better life. These families stayed and gave birth to children who are now second generation Iranian-Americans. A few members of this generation have chosen to pursue art and have been constantly challenged by issues of identity due to their dual heritage. Many have struggled against art criticism that uses their heritage as an interpretive lens for their practice, which raises the question: Why have art critics, curators and audiences persisted in identifying these artworks with a particular region?

In 2010, despite financial hardship and sanctions, the next generation of artists came from Iran to pursue their graduate degrees in American art schools, which had been an uncommon choice for the previous 30 years. The lack of Iranian artists in the Western art scene sets narrow expectations for these recent immigrants, who were forced to respond to their experience in a new environment.

“Sedentary Fragmentation” tries to bring together Iranian voices, generations, and alumni who studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, but whose practices are individual and different. This exhibition will show how these nine artists subtly use and reveal their identities in a politically complex milieu. Showcasing archival materials from the artists’ experience in both Chicago and Tehran, this exhibition offers challenging points of view about several generations of artists who are often misrepresented by having identities placed upon them that do not define them as artists.

Hannibal Alkhas (1930-2010) painter, sculptor, writer, poet and translator. Alkhas began his artistic training as a child in Iran and went on to receive his Master of Fine Arts from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1959. In addition to over fifty years as a professional painter, he had a long career in Iran and in the United States as an art professor and mentored many aspiring artists. He also established the successful Gilgamesh Gallery, one of the very first modern art galleries in Iran. His works have been exhibited in Iran, Europe, Canada, Australia, Israel, Dubai, and the US. He published art criticism, collections of short stories, children’s books and memoirs in Farsi, and composed many poems in his native Assyrian (Syriac). After attending his 80th birthday retrospective exhibition in Iran, Hannibal Alkhas died in California on September 14, 2010. He wrote and painted actively until his final illness.

Mehdi Hosseini (1943, Iran)

Mehdi Hosseini is a faculty member at the University of the Arts, Tehran. He received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1968 and MFA from Pratt Institute of New York in 1970. Hosseini is a permanent member of The Iranian Academy of Arts and an honorary member of Iran Painters Community. He has supervised many graduate students at the Ph.D level. He has shown nationally and internationally. Hosseini has received “Grade 1” degree of excellence in visual arts by the Academy of Arts in Iran.

Raha Raissnia (1968, Iran)

Raha Raissnia (b.1968 Tehran, Iran) creates complex works which combine painting, film and drawing. Much of her work is focused on exploring the intersection of these different mediums and how each informs the other in terms of their materiality and their respective processes of making. Raissnia lives and works in Brooklyn and is represented by Miguel Abreu Gallery in New York, Ab/Anbar Gallery in Tehran, Iran, Galeria Marta Cervera in Madrid, and Galerie Xippas in Paris. She received her BFA from the School of the Art institute of Chicago in 1992 and her MFA from Pratt Institute in 2002. In 2015, her work was included in All the World's Futures, 56th Venice Biennale curated by Okwui Enwezor. Recent solo exhibitions were held at Ab/Anbar Gallery (Tehran), Miguel Abreu Gallery, Galeria Marta Cervera (Madrid), Galerie Xippas (Paris), and the Isfahan Museum of Contemporary Art (Isfahan, Iran).

Azadeh Gholizadeh (1982, Iran)

Azadeh Gholizadeh, is a Chicago-based artist and architect. Born in Tehran, Gholizadeh received her MA in Architecture and her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012. In her current practice she explores tensions and challenges of diaspora. Defining boundaries and blurring the lines that demarks her identity are the subjects that she reflects in her practice. Gholizadeh was a resident at the BOLT Residency Program at Chicago Artists Coalition and the Center Program at Hyde Park Art Center. She has shown in different venues such as Efrain Lopez, Soap Factory and Hyde Park Art Center.

Yasamin Ghanbari (1984, USA)

Yasi Ghanbari is an artist using an interdisciplinary practice living and working in Brooklyn, NY. She received her BA from Oberlin College and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Film, Video, and New Media. Ghanbari has shown her work nationally and internationally at venues such as the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), Centre for Contemporary Arts (Glasgow), NURTUREart (Brooklyn), and the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (New York).

Nazafarin Lotfi (1984, Iran)

Nazafarin Lotfi is a visual artist based in Chicago. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011 and her BA from the University of Tehran in 2007. Solo exhibitions include: Poiesis at Fernwey Gallery, Chicago; White Light at Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago; Love at Last Sight at Brand New Gallery, Milan; Circles at Tony Wight Gallery, Chicago. Recent group exhibitions: This here at Regards Gallery, Chicago; the Particular Poetics of Things at Goldfinch Gallery, Chicago; Resonant Objects, Logan Center Exhibitions, Pattern Recognition, Ana Cristea Gallery, New York. Lotfi was the Artist in Residence at the University of Chicago’s Arts and Public Life Program during 2015-16.

Elnaz Javani (1985, Iran)

Elnaz Javani (Iran) is an artist, researcher, and educator. Her studio work consists of sculpture, installation and sound works which take domestic materials as their point of departure into a larger discussion on trauma, memory and violence. Her work is devoted to the micropolitics of everyday life and the ways by which one can uncover the latent narratives within objects, events and collective experiences. Javani holds a MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from the Tehran Art University of Iran. Her work has been exhibited internationally in USA, Spain, UAE, Germany and Switzerland.

Maryam Hoseini (1988, Iran)

Maryam Hoseini (b. 1988 Tehran, Iran) is an artist currently living and working in New York. Her work explores the subtle relationships between bodies, architectural space, and politics of narrative. She holds an MFA from both the Milton Avery School of the Arts, Bard College and the School of Art Institute of Chicago.

Sophie Loloie (1993, USA)

Third culture child raised between Iran, Canada and the United States, Sophie Loloie graduated from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), with a focus in Visual Communication Design and Photography/Video. She is working between the intersections of Image-Making and Design. Her work seeks to bring elegant simplicity to complexity to communicate an idea and experience. She is currently interested in exploring stories of femininity, her culture and language through typographic and visual methods.

ACRE (Artist Cooperative Residency and Exhibitions) is an organization founded and run entirely by artists for artists. Each summer ACRE transforms a farm in Wisconsin into a proving ground for community making and participatory learning. With creativity at the core of the organization the potential sites for experimentation are endless and beyond studio time and workshops also take the form of dinners, dance parties, impromptu nail salons, ad hoc parades, tubing excursions and, even, daily administrative tasks.

The residency is staffed by artist-volunteers with diverse creative backgrounds. Together their varied perspectives are combined to build a dialogue-rich and exploratory space for summer artists in residence to grow, focus, and learn from one another. For the two-week residency, ideas between staff, residents, and visiting artists co-mingle and collide as we socialize, brainstorm, and create together.

In this spirit, staff members from each department at the residency (printmaking, fiber studio, ceramics, A/V, recording studio, wood shop, and kitchen) were asked to invite a recent resident with whom they connected or worked closely while at the residency. Summer Sessions is an exhibition built from mutual admiration and fruitful experimentation.

MARINA BALKO is an artist and the Director of Institutional Engagement for AS220, a multidisciplinary community arts organization in downtown Providence, Rhode Island. Primarily exhibiting in mixed-media installations, Balko’s artistic disciplines include film, video, 3D modeling and animation, creative coding and interactive design, digital and darkroom photography, fibers, costume design, food art, performance and curation. Balko starting working with the ACRE kitchen in 2013 and has returned every summer since. She has made food themed to the exhibitions at the ACRE Gallery and contributed to the publication of Kadabra, the ACRE Kitchen’s annual artist cookbook.

JULIE POTRATZ is an artist whose performances, videos, and celebrity impersonations take a phenomenological look at what it means to inhabit a body. With excesses of material, drama, and grotesque cartoons, she slips between the fantastical and the everyday, while continually undergoing physical and psychological transformations. Potratz was a resident in 2012. juliepotratz.com

COLIN TIMOTHY DICKSON is a native of the Midwest. Born in Wisconsin and raised in Indiana, he received his BFA in Sculpture at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. Dickson works in Chicago as a skilled craftsperson and builder, generating a range of objects including mid-century modern-inspired furniture, utilitarian cabinetry, and an expanding collection of cat furniture/sculpture. Dickson began working with ACRE as a resident in 2013. He returned in 2014 and 2015 bringing his carpentry skills to the woodshop. clndkn.com

BURNING ORCHID is the meeting of the multidisciplinary practices of Rosé Hernandez and Efrén Arcoiris, which exists as a third entity and moves towards a faceted crystalline form. Hernandez brings experience in performance, movement, and Butoh; while Arcoiris incorporates sculpture and installation. They were residents in 2015 and have volunteered in various and very helpful ways in Chicago ever since.

BEN DRIGGS was born in Pekin, Illinois. He received his BFA with a focus in sculpture from Columbia College Chicago in 2004. His work relates to the countryside and everyday art objects. He is currently rehabbing a building in Little Village where he lives with his partner. Driggs was a resident in 2010 and kitchen staff in 2011. He returned in 2012 and 2013 to work in the wood shop. In 2015 he, along with fellow ACRE alumni Wolfie E. Rawk, successfully proposed and built a ceramics studio at the residency.For summer 2017 he plans to introduce a raku kiln to the studio.Bendriggs.com

KATE KLINGBEIL is a multi-disciplinary artist currently living and working in Brooklyn, New York. She grew up on a farm in the suburbs of Milwaukee, Wisconsin where she spent her childhood surrounded by animals and riding horses. Her work spans the mediums of painting, sculpture, ceramics, and animation, and investigates sexuality, feminine power, memory, personal experiences, animal/human communication, secrets and movement. Klingbeil was a resident in 2016.kateklingbeil.com

eric fleischauer is an artist, curator, and educator living in Chicago, Illinois. fleischauer utilizes conceptually-driven production strategies to be read as an aestheticized form of media theory and criticism examining the nuance of technology’s pervasive influences. fleischauer was a Visiting Artist to ACRE in 2011 and 2012, and became staff in 2013. He has worked with the A/V department from 2013-2017. He has also served as a member of the ACRE Admissions Committee in 2016 and 2017.ericfleischauer.com

KAYLA ANDERSON is an artist, writer, and organizer based in Chicago, Illinois. Using a playful approach to methods of excavation, her work engages with cultural artifacts of the past in order to propose parallel worlds. Anderson was a resident in 2015. kaylanderson.com

HEATHER MACKENZIE is an artist and educator with a research-based and concept-driven practice founded in hand weaving. Her research takes both theoretical and practical forms as she experiments with materials, processes, and loom technologies. MacKenzie was a resident is 2012 and joined the residency as staff in 2013. Starting in the kitchen MacKenzie helped at the beginning the residency’s first fibers and weaving studio in 2014. She has continued to work in that department in 2016 and 2017.cargocollective.com/hmackenzie

CATRON BOOKER is a video and performance artist originally from Chicago, Illinois and currently living in Oaxaca, Mexico. Her work has screened at Anthology Film Archives (NYC), Seattle Local Sightings Film Fest, Artists' Television Access (SF) and Cologne International Videoart Festival. Performance works have been presented at Lexington Art League and in Obsidian: Literature & Arts of the African Diaspora. Booker was a resident in 2016, while there her performance was featured in the Boscobel Dial, a local newspaper.freeandfunky.tumblr.com

A.E. PATERRA is a drummer, synthesist, and composer born, raised, and currently living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He co-founded the synth-prog duo Zombi in 2001, who have since released 6 full length albums while touring the world extensively. Paterra came to ACRE in 2011 as a visiting musician under his solo project Majeure. He returned to the residency to work in the ACRE kitchen in 2012. In 2013 Paterra moved to the recording studio working closely with residents to record music and experimental sound projects from 2013 to 2017.majeure.bandcamp.com

ALLEN MOORE is a Black American visual and experimental sound artist born and raised in the small village of Robbins, Illinois, just south of Chicago. His work converses with the signifiers of African American culture and popular culture; bringing into view the underlying themes of racial, emotional and socio-economic conditions. Moore was a resident in 2015. He returned as staff in 2016 and 2017.allenmooreart.com

AAY PRESTON- MYINT is an artist, printmaker, and educator living in Chicago, Illinois. Their practice employs both visual and collaborative strategies to investigate memory and kinship, often within the specific context of queer community and history. Aay was staff in 2010 ACRE’s first year a resident in 2011 and returned as staff in 2015 in the screenprinting studio. They have served as a member of the ACRE Admissions and Equity Committees.
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ALEXANDRA ANTOINE is an interdisciplinary artist from Orlando, Florida who now resides in Chicago, Illinois. Her work addresses the themes of identity and culture through the use of typography, line and portraiture. She uses the portrait as a tool to re/present individuals of the African diaspora while exploring her relationship to them within the larger narrative of her Haitian identity. Antoine was a resident in 2016. alexandraantoine.com

KATE BOWEN is an artist, curator, and arts organizer in Chicago, Illinois. She runs an experimental screening series called Video Playlist at the Museum of Contemporary Photography and is the Exhibitions Director for ACRE. Kate was a resident is 2011 and began working for ACRE as a curatorial fellow in 2012. As a summer residency staff member she started in the kitchen, and now works in the AV Department from 2014-2017. katembowen.com

RAVEN FALQUEZ MUNSELL is a writer, curator, and arts administrator in Chicago, Illinois. She is cofounder of the late artist bumper sticker project and mobile gallery Trunk Show and currently co-directs Third Object, a roving curatorial collective. She started with ACRE as a curatorial fellow from 2013-2015 and has worked at the summer residency in 2015, 2016 and will work in 2017.thirdobject.net

Heaven Gallery is a non-profit gallery and multi-disciplinary arts space in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood that encourages, mentors, and presents new and emerging artists, musicians, and filmmakers to audiences throughout Chicagoland and beyond. Heaven has been a sister organization to ACRE since its inception. They have generously hosted exhibitions and fundraisers with ACRE since 2010.

ACRE (Artists’ Cooperative Residency and Exhibitions) is an artist-run non-profit based in Chicago devoted to employing various systems of support for emerging artists and to creating a generative community of cultural producers. ACRE investigates and institutes models designed to help artists develop, present, and discuss their practices by providing forums for idea exchange, interdisciplinary collaboration, and experimental projects.

Heaven Gallery marks 17 years with a silent art auction and dance party, featuring works by some of Chicago's most talented visual artists. Universal Love is about celebrating our multi-cultural city. Our strength comes from our diversity and we become empowered by honoring our differences. Heaven is a place of Universal Love for all people, always.

Come be uplifted by the riddim and dance away the political darkness to reggae: a global music of healing that ignites unity and love. Sip on tropical libations while listening to Simmer Down Sound, one of Chicago's diverse reggae and dancehall nights from the Double Door. SDS selection is strictly vinyl with resident DJsThe Graduate, Rad Brian, Marcuslyah and King Tony.
Special performance by Cosmos Ray from Akasha!

Sounds fade and time disappears when looking dominates the senses. Landscape motifs give way to this kind of seeing and unfold the eccentric forms that humans have carved into our world. When a dialectic between nature and consciousness mirrors one between observation and representation, the observed world becomes an imagined world, and between unaffected trees and domestic gardens, there is a wild serpent, a flock of fowl, something animate. This new world portends all that is child-like, animal-like, and angelic.

Shelter, likewise presents recent paintings and drawings made while James Kao was in residence at the Alfred and Trafford Klots International Program for Artists in Lehon, France.

James Kao is a Chicago-based artist, co-director of 4 th Ward Project Space, and Assistant Professor of Art at Aurora University, in Aurora, IL.

Bulk Discount
Evan Stoler

Evan Stoler highlights materials and objects overlooked in everyday life and decontextualizes the familiar– from discarded eggshells to a row of staples. All items featured can be purchased in bulk, and instead of breaking them down into normal usages such as a piece of tape or a sleeve of Smarties, he embraces the army. Capturing motion and bridging spaces are themes that Stoler explores with the different sets of building blocks. He also seeks to intertwine industrial consumption with motifs of the natural world.

The arrival of Ophiuchus (the snake bearer as well as shiny new zodiac according to NASA’s recent discovery) underlined the looming interchangeability of the prescribed identity both astrological and metaphysical. Searching for new definitions of social behavior, compromise, respect and understanding has had many preoccupied as of late. To survive and flourish we must adapt. How does adaptation lead to questions of existence, orientation, belief, or one’s survival? When the structure shifts, the rules of the game change, and the framework distorts. The collaborative work of Annie and Delaney is choreographed by call and response. Objects, images, and materials owned/made by each artist are shared and then altered by the other. A continuous exchange is exercised until a piece is jointly removed from the cycle. A common sense of humor, material knowledge and history, reveals moments of mimicry, cheeky antics and a clear, inherent desire to fulfill anticipated potential. We both work hard toward an un-hatched collaborative goal. Expectations, surprise and surrender make room for consequence.

Annie Kielman
ANNIE KIELMAN (www.anniekielman.com)
Annie Kielman is a Chicago based artist whose multi-media work focuses on reconstructed impressions through manipulations of process, material, and language. Annie received her MFA in Printmedia from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013. She currently teaches at Harold Washington College and School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is co-founder of a Print shop and shared artist space in Pilsen. Annie has exhibited and lectured widely in Chicago and throughout the US.

Chicago Solisti is comprised of musicians, students and artists from the metropolitan Chicago area. They've performed individually across the country as soloists, orchestral and chamber musicians and hold degrees in performance, composition and music education from the most prestigious institutions in the country. Our mission is to provide the cultural landscape of Chicago with creatively programmed and varied format concerts in addition to presenting standard repertoire with fresh perspective.

In it’s inaugural season, Chicago Solisti quickly established itself as an ambitious and engaging chamber ensemble in the Chicagoland community. Committed to supporting new works and actively commissioning pieces from contemporary composers, Solisti has collaborated with modern composers to present new compositions and has been engaged to perform concerts, chamber recitals and masterclasses across the Midwest.

This show is a love letter. From one artist to another. To those who give me hope in the wake of a new post-election reality. Absorbing the pain I was feeling myself and from those around me, I realized it’s more important than ever to speak to the issues presented here. I came to this show with the body and pleasure in mind.

To put it simply: These artists work with the body, sexuality and gender in ways that push, seduce, and play with us. They bring forward the complexities of our bodies and minds with what it means to be seen, touched, hurt, and loved. What it means to be human.

For me they are magicians in the studio, taking us to places that feel true and full of life. They all invite us to engage on an intimate level; one cannot look and look away. The afterimage stays. It sinks in.

“And now, after living beside you all these years, and watching your wheel of a mind bring forth an art of pure wildness - as I labor grimly on these sentences, wondering all the while if prose is but the gravestone marking the forsaking of wildness (fidelity to sense-making, to assertion, to argu- ment, however loose) - I’m no longer sure which of us is more at home in the world, which of us more free.”

For the third consecutive year, join McKenna Glorioso and friends at Heaven Gallery for a concert of chamber music following the busy holiday season. Repertoire will include works by Dvorak, Vaughan-Williams, Piazzolla, Beethoven, and more.

$10 suggested donation at the door.

McKenna Glorioso is an American violinist at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University in Montréal, Quebec. She currently studies with Axel Strauss and Marcelle Mallette and has also recently studied with Aurelien Pederzoli and Ilya Kaler in Chicago. McKenna has held the position of Concertmistress of the DePaul Chamber Orchestra and has played under the baton of conductors such as Dr. Cliff Colnot, Alexis Hauser, Michael Lewanski, and Darryl One. In 2017, she will appear as Assistant-Concertmaster of the McGill Opera Orchestra for their production of Strauss’ Die Fledermaus. She plays a violin on generous loan by Dr. Wilhelm Schlag.

Elizabeth Glorioso is an American cellist based in Cleveland, Ohio. She is currently in her second year of studies at the Cleveland Institute of Music, pursuing a Master’s Degree in Cello Performance and Suzuki Pedagogy in the studio of Sharon Robinson. Passionate about chamber music, Ms. Glorioso has had the pleasure of touring Italy and Slovenia with Trio Glorioso, a piano trio founded in Duino, Italy. This year, Ms. Glorioso was also pleased to be admitted into CIM’s Advanced Piano Trio Program with her ensemble, Trio Zeta.

Jerome de los Santos, a Los Angeles native, has performed in venues across the United States, Canada, Italy, and Philippines. Praised for "possessing qualities of a true artist - maturity, imagination, musicality, sensitivity, amazing stage presence, passion, and effortless technique”, Jerome performs actively both as soloist and as a chamber musician. Aside from music, he enjoys studying foreign languages, spending time with his dog Yana, and traveling to new places. He holds a Bachelor’s of Music degree from the Cleveland Institute of Music, in the class of Daniel Shapiro, and a minor in Italian from Case Western University. For more information please visit: www.jeromedelossantos.com.